Nintendo’s First Playable Female Protagonist Isn’t Female in Japan

Technically speaking, the first Nintendo game to feature a female protagonist is Clu Clu Land, but she’s only specified as being female in localizations outside Japan.

Released for the Famicom on November 28, 1984, Clu Clu Land can be broadly described as a response to Pac-Man, though a good many gameplay innovations distinguish it from Namco’s iconic dot-muncher. In Clu Clu Land, players control a red, spherical creature around various single-screen levels, but instead of eating dots, they’re amassing what the English localization deems gold bars, and instead of wending their way around corridors, they’re pivoting around poles, spinning in a circle until they shoot off in a new direction. It’s actually not the easiest concept to communicate in writing, but once you see it in action, you’ll get it.

In the English localization of the game, released October 18, 1985, this protagonist is introduced as Bubbles and is explicitly female. The instruction manual text makes clear everything there is to know about Bubbles: “A hand comes out from her body. She bounces off walls like a ball, but if she’s hit by one of Sea Urchin’s needles, she bursts. She attacks Sea Urchin by giving out electric shocks.” So there you go: she’s got one functional hand, a fatal allergy to sharp things, and apparent electric powers. Really, what more could you ask for in a video game protagonist?

While most of this description applies to the Japanese version as well, what’s really interesting about the English localization of Clu Clu Land is that somebody at Nintendo made the decision that this ball-like creature should be female despite the fact that there’s nothing that would indicate gender one way or another. In the Japanese version of the game, the same character is named グルッピー, usually rendered in English as Gloopy, and no gender is given, at least in the original instruction manual.

And in the case of this English-language arcade flyer for Vs. Clu Clu Land, the character is still Gloopy, not Bubbles. (Via Giant Bomb.)

This post is mostly about the treatment of the character’s gender, but it’s worth pointing out that rendering the Japanese グルッピー as Gloopy makes it harder to spot how the name of the game and the name of the protagonist are based on the same Japanese mimetic word: クルクル, translated as kurukuru and meaning “spinning,” although there’s also an alternate form — グルグル or guruguru, also meaning “spinning.” Clu Clu Land is really Kuru Kuru Land (or “spinning land,” which makes sense, given the way the character changes direction) and Gloopy (sometimes given as Guruppī or Goruppī) is the one who spins. 

In the early days of the NES, female protagonists were rare in games in general and in Nintendo-produced ones specifically. Metroid, which wouldn’t debut until August 1986, features a female protagonist, but that fact is hidden from the player until the end of the game — and even then, only if certain conditions are met. Metroid was preceded by Mach Rider, first released August 27, 1985, and this game might hide a similar twist, with a woman potentially being the person who’s underneath all that futuristic armor, but there’s no hint of that in the original console release of the game, only in the follow-up released for the Nintendo Vs. arcade system. 

In fact, the only named female character to precede Bubbles as being playable in a Nintendo game is Nana, the female half of the Ice Climbers. And while I suppose you could argue that Nana is *a* protagonist, she’s not the default character assigned to player one; she’s the Luigi of this pair, only controllable if you’re player two. Bubbles, however, is the default character in Clu Clu Land, and player two controls Bubbles as well — just a green version of her. That had not happened before in a Nintendo title, even if it didn’t register the same way in its native Japan. (Also, the release schedule is tricky: Ice Climber debuted as an arcade title in October 1984, getting a port on the Famicom in January 1985, which is technically after Clu Clu Land was released in November 1984, but the North American translation of Clu Clu Land doesn’t come out until October 1985, and that’s when Bubbles becomes an explicitly female character.)

Unsurprisingly, I haven’t been able to find who at Nintendo decided to make Bubbles female, but I’d love to find out why they did. It seems almost arbitrary. This character’s gender doesn’t exactly help Clu Clu Land’s marketing in North America because it wasn’t advertised; Nintendo did not promote Clu Clu Land as “Nintendo for girls” or Bubbles as their answer to Ms. Pac-Man. In fact, the text on the game box omits mention of Bubbles’ name, to say nothing of gender, and it’s entirely possible to play though Clu Clu Land without realizing Bubbles is female. I suppose this decision could have resulted from someone with a mind for gender parity looking at the upcoming slate of games and realizing female characters were underrepresented, but more than anything the choice to give the character any gender probably resulted from a quirk of Japanese that I’ve mentioned on this site before: Japanese doesn’t rely on gendered pronouns the way English does, so it’s more commonplace to have character descriptions that don’t mention gender. (For example, the Japanese manual for Castlevania III does not gender Sypha, who turns out to be female in a Metroid-style surprise. However, both the Japanese and the English manuals for Metroid explicitly state that Samus is male — an unfair misdirect, perhaps.)

Occasionally (but not always) when female characters did appear back in the day, they were made to look explicitly, unmistakably female — either by wearing pink (like Princess Peach and Princess Zelda as depicted in the official art, if not the games themselves) or getting a bow stuck on their head (like Ms. Pacman). Lala, the main female character in the Adventures of Lolo series, is a damsel in distress in the first two NES titles but a playable character in Adventures of Lolo 3, and she manages to have a bow *and* be pink, as did a good number of female characters from Nintendo franchises on the cutesier end of the spectrum, including Wendy O. Koopa, Birdo and Ana from Earthbound Beginnings. Bubbles avoids all of this, presumably because her creators over at Nintendo of Japan never intended her to be a female character, but that’s also what makes her a standout in the canon of Nintendo heroines. 

Clockwise from top-left: Peach in pink in Japanese promo art for Super Mario Bros. (even if she wore red and white in-game); Zelda promo art for Legend of Zelda (even if she wears whatever color Link wears in-game); Lolo and Lala before they became Kirby characters; the extremely gendered Ms. Pac-Man.

In fact, Bubbles is such a standout that I’m not even fully clear on what she’s supposed to be, exactly. The Wikipedia page for Clu Clu Land identifies her as a balloonfish, which seems to be a sort of porcupinefish, but I don’t think Nintendo was going for any kind of undersea realism here, especially because Bubbles is round and lacking spines, while the things with spines are the bad guys. For years, however, the Wikipedia page identified her as a “bubblefish,” which is not a real-life species but which would at least account for her intense allergy to anything sharp. Just looking at her design, I’m not sure Bubbles was ever intended to be a fish at all, even if the setting of the game is presumably underwater. (The manual never actually says this, referring only to “an underground mystery maze.”) What appears to be a fish tail on her sprite is probably just her tiny legs floating behind her. For what it’s worth, the Nintendo e-Reader text for the Clu Clu Land card, released in 2003, describes Bubbles as a “red adventurer” only — not any kind of fish.

Around and around she, he or they go.

Also? I’ve seen fish before. I know what fish look like. And I’ve even seen fish looking more or less like fish while being rendered in pixels. Bubbles does not look like a fish. If anything, she looks more like a Pac-Man — or some other character that amounts to an ambulatory face that’s made to navigate around a maze. Honestly, she kind of looks like Lolo and Lala in the Eggerland series, who both happen to be just that: faces with arms and legs moving around a single-screen level.

What’s that waggling? I think it’s two feet and a skinny tail, and not a fisht-like tail.

Whatever Bubbles was meant to be, her video game career was ultimately short-lived. Mere weeks after her Famicom debut, she starred in an expanded version of Clu Clu Land released for the Nintendo Vs. arcade system. A version of that game was eventually released for the Famicom Disk System in 1992 as Clu Clu Land: Welcome to New Clu Clu Land. In 2005, Nintendo released DK: King of Swing, a Donkey Kong one-off that had characters navigating levels by swinging from peg to peg in a way that was very reminiscent of Clu Clu Land. As a result, Bubbles appears as an unlockable character. (She is not present in the 2007 sequel, DK: Jungle Climber, however.) 

While she would appear as a costume in the first Mario Maker, Bubbles has not gotten a spot in a Smash Bros. title and may not ever. In 2001, in promotion of Smash Bros. Melee, Masahiro Sakurai posted that he wanted to have one representative of the Nintendo’s early 8-bit days in the mix, and the Ice Climbers won out over reps from Balloon Fight, Urban Champion, Excitebike and Clu Clu Land, the reason for the last one being that he couldn’t figure out how Bubbles would fight. The only representative of the Clu Clu Land series to get anything close to an active role is the Unira enemy, a chuckable, spiky obstacle.

Bubbles’ trophy in Super Smash Bros. Melee. I’m assuming the “mysterious” is a reference to the fact that we don’t really know what she is. It’s in this depiction that you can best see her long and very not-fish-like tail. BTW, this article detailing all of the characters considered but ultimately rejected for a playable spot in Smash Bros. is a great read. Would recommend.

Surely, Bubbles’ unique method of locomotion would complicate her presence in a Smash Bros. game, but the question of how she would attack seems like it could be answered easily enough with those trademark electricity zaps mentioned in the instruction manual. Here’s the thing, though: In reading about the game online, I usually saw her projectile attack be described as sound waves, not electric shocks. It’s widespread enough online that it’s stated this way on the Nintendo Wiki and the TV Tropes page, and the way the game shows off these attacks really doesn’t suggest anything electric. 

I mean, this could be lots of things, and included in that is an electric attack? But also other games use little lightning bolts or the like to visually convey “this is an electric attack.”

Those sites aren’t official, of course, but there’s some evidence in actual Nintendo products that this is the case. As I wrote about in one of the first posts I did on this site, the second dungeon boss in the original Legend of Zelda, Digdogger, is actually a supersized version of the Unira from Clu Clu Land. This boss is specifically weak to sound, and players can only beat it by playing Link’s recorder — or by using the microphone built into the player two controller on the Famicom version of the game. But lest you think that the electric zaps are an invention of the localized text the way Bubbles’ gender is, that’s not the case; they’re in the original Japanese as well.

I suppose neither electric shocks nor sonic blasts make more sense than the other as a special weapon when you’re talking about a sentient red rubber ball who is purportedly a fish even though she does not look like a fish. Then again, one of the things I like about this character is that she doesn’t make a lot of sense, but she gets to be a famous first in Nintendo history anyway. In an industry where a lot of female characters tend to be either cutesy or sexy, I like how Nintendo’s pantheon of female characters begins with this inexplicable weirdo who just defies categorization in so many ways. 

Long live Bubbles… whatever you may be.

Miscellaneous Notes

While Bubbles might be the first female Nintendo protagonist, at least in certain regions, and Nana from Ice Climbers might be the first named female playable character, Kate Willaert points out that the first playable female character in a Nintendo game is the nameless female duffer in Vs. Ladies Golf, released in arcades in both Japan and North America in 1984. What’s more, however, is that this character might actually be Pauline from Donkey Kong, playable long before her canonical playable debut following her reintroduction in Super Mario Odyssey. 

I’m inclined to think Willaert is correct, and if you read this thread, you’ll find there’s some good evidence to support this. I’ve got my own post on Pauline planned, and I’m looking forward to talking about how she might fit into Nintendo history in a way that’s bigger than some people might realize.

Clu Clu Land is not the only Nintendo game to emphasize spinning as a major gameplay concept and to also incorporate the word kururkuru into its title. There’s also the 2001 Game Boy Advance title Kuru Kuru Kururin — a.k.a. the “spinning stick” game and its sequels. The stick itself — Helirin, which is a type of helicopter piloted by a bird — appeared as an Assist Trophy in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

Weirdly enough, Bubbles does not actually debut in Clu Clu Land. The first appearance of the character is in the international version of the arcade title Vs. Pinball, released July 26, 1984, four months before Clu Clu Land was released. In the original Japanese version of the title, the spot Bubbles occupies is filled instead by a red version of Achilles, a generic bird enemy present in the software associated with the Famicom-only Family BASIC accessory, which I will be discussing in greater detail in my Pauline post. In the version of the game released outside Japan the following October, however, it’s Bubbles, about a month beforefor Clu Clu Land hit shelves. It’s sort of an in-game ad: “Hey, kids! Meet Bubbles, Nintendo’s newest video game star and your next favorite 8-bit icon!”

Just look at that big, toothy grin. (Via the Super Mario Wiki.)

While the Digdogger boss might be a singular callback to Clu Clu Land made in the original Legend of Zelda, there’s actually an even deeper connection between these two Nintendo series — it’s just one that has been rendered hard to spot by the fact that Zelda kind of took off and ran with it. One of the main mechanics of Clu Clu Land is that Bubbles needs to cross over all the spaces that are hiding gold bars in order to form a picture; when they’ve all been traversed, you can see what picture you made, kinda sorta in a connect-the-dots style, and you progress to the next level. Those gold bars (sometimes called gold ingots), however, are identical in design to the Rupees that appeared two years later in Legend of Zelda. Essentially, this element that appears in almost every Zelda game was borrowed from somewhere else. It became a Zelda thing because it took off as a franchise in a way that Clu Clu Land did not.

Left: sprites from Clu Clu Land. Right: sprites from Legend of Zelda.

Unless you choose to look at the rupees/gold bars as a sort of stock design element that was just lying around the Nintendo office and made its way into two otherwise unrelated games, the Rupees in Legend of Zelda are the longest-lived legacy of Clu Clu Land.

The generic sea urchin enemies appearing in the Mario games starting with Super Mario World are also called ウニラ or Unira in Japan, so it’s possible this is a nod to Clu Clu Land. However, it could be that both are just playing off the Japanese word for “urchin,” ウニ or uni. Similarly, the spinning ball-and-chain obstacle from Super Mario World is called グルグル or Guruguru in Japan, but it’s not a reference to Clu Clu Land specifically.

I don’t have any good theories for where Bubbles’ Japanese name might come from. I suppose グルッピー (Gloopy) could be a portmanteau of グルグル (“spinning”) and the English word guppy, but then again I’m not convinced this character is actually supposed to be a fish. 

Another reason that it’s not fair to write off Clu Clu Land as Nintendo’s answer to Pac-Man? Because that honor rightly goes to Devil World, which is more Pac-Man-like but which also adds a lot to the basic “dot eat game” formula.

Speaking of the phrase “dot eat game,” in researching this post, I found that that ドットイートゲーム (literally Dottoītogēmu) is a Japanese term describing Pac-Man and its imitators, more or less — to paraphrase, games involving passing over targets such as dots spread in a maze while escaping enemies who are chasing you. The Japanese Wikipedia page notes that Sega’s 1979 arcade title Head On might be the first, but Pac-Man is obviously the most famous. What I think is interesting is that we don’t have a handy name for this in English even though we totally should. “Maze chase” doesn’t quite capture the same spirit. I suppose we could call them Pac-Man-likes, but that’s too many hyphens in a row for me.

Apologies for the delay in getting new posts up on this site. I do have a lot more I want to write about, but this has just been a very trying year for me. This post actually began as a single paragraph in a larger story about crossovers and in-jokes in early Nintendo games and I just kept finding more for it until it grew into this. That big post is coming, but there will probably be more and more of these smaller lead-ups to it that show up on this blog first.